A Book of the Month Club selection, Super Massage, now enhanced for ebook readers, offers fast, sensual relaxation in minutes. $8.95 on all e-book readers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

What did Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Marlene Deitrich, Henry Kissinger and Ulysses S. Grant have in common? They seldom left home without a masseur. Now you too can reap the delicious benefits of massage—just minutes after you begin this gorgeous new e-book.

Massage is a sensual art; you don’t think about it, you simply surrender to the pleasure. You will feel the pleasure just browsing through “Super Massage.” Written and photographed by Gordon Inkeles, author of the million-seller “The Art of Sensual Massage,” this new edition has been enhanced page by page for e-book readers.

Every page of “Super Massage” features easy-to-learn massage sequences that provide drugless relief from aches and pains. Easy-to-learn massage techniques for common ailments like headaches, muscle fatigue, insomnia, a stiff neck, back pain, headaches and stress-induced fatigue let you put the book to work right away. Here too are techniques to provide instant energy at home and at work with special attention to after exercise conditioning. Lovers will cherish the beautiful erotic massage section. The book also includes a provocative essay on massage and life extension.

Inkeles takes aim at one of the unacknowledged scourges of the modern office: stress addiction. Learn to recognize “the seductive powers of stress” and what to do during a massage to break this nasty cycle. “Massaging the Stress Addict” shows you exactly what to do to bring drugless relief in minutes, a massage sequence that can be life-changing.

Do you feel like you could be getting more out of your “professional” massage? Take “The Massage Bill of Rights” to your next session and transform your massage experience.

Prize winning photographs by Gordon Inkeles appear on every page. Some are matched to exquisite anatomical illustrations by Icelandic fine artist Sigga Bjornsson. Jon Goodchild, designer of “The Art of Sensual Massage,” provided a beautiful new book design. As much a pleasure to read as it is to use, “Super Massage” makes an ideal romantic gift.

New 40th anniversary edition of THE ART OF SENSUAL MASSAGE adds gorgeous color and many upgrades to the world’s best selling massage book.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LEARN TO GIVE PLEASURE WITH YOUR HANDS

– Sep 28, 2011 – With a warm, quiet place and a bottle of oil–and this incredible book–you can spread pleasure over every inch of your partner’s body.

For more than a million readers The Art of Sensual Massage is more than a book, it’s an unforgettable sensual experience. Techniques are beautifully illustrated with hundreds of gorgeous black and white photos. New in this edition: rare color photos, taken during the book’s original sessions, appear in sumptuous two page spreads. Instructions are easy-to-learn. Ten minutes after you open this book you will be doing a sensual massage.

This updated paper edition features: a lay flat binding which allows to book to lay open during massage. Every page is reproduced on art book quality paper which allows for superb photo reproduction, the best in the book’s long history. Many helpful text updates are also included to make learning massage easier than ever.

The E-book edition is scrupulously formatted by hand to preserve the book’s classic beauty.

Read what people say about THE ART OF SENSUAL MASAGE

“Beautifully produced: a book to give, especially if you’d like its techniques used on you.” –Cosmopolitan

“Attractive as well as instructive…tells you what to massage, when and where. Much recommended.”–Ms London

If you want to encourage the man in your life to be more sensual, romantic and inventive…put THE ART OF SENSUAL MASSAGE in his stocking.” –MS London

“Close your eyes, breathe deeply and give yourself up to THE PLEASURE.” –New York

In a world full of expensive gadgets futilely designed to increase enjoyment of life it is enormously satisfying to realize that you can give so much pleasure just using your hands.

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Arcata Arts publishes the million-seller The Art of Sensual Massage, the world’s best selling massage book. Our line of massage books and videos featuring easy-to-learn techniques make the perfect romantic gifts.

PRLog (Press Release) – Sep 26, 2011 – Enhanced page by page and photo by photo, this beautiful ebook has been optimized for e-book readers. Photos expand to fill your screen, illustrations are easy to read and everything fits. Here is a new role for the expectant father, involving him in the birthing process every step of the way throughout a pregnancy–from the first month through full recovery.

Learn:

√ a basic massage for the whole body
√ a complete ten minute head massage
√ Easy to learn massage for morning sickness, circulatory problems, lactation stimulation and more
√ A day-to-day recovery program after birth—to minimize stretch marks and ease the mother back to normal
√ Step-by-step photos with matching illustrations

Perfect for birthing classes and expectant parents, this lovely ebook opens the door to drugless therapy, relaxation and peace. All the techniques are easy to learn.

The expectant father may feel confused about exactly what his role is supposed to be. This book gives him a hands-on positive role throughout the pregnancy and makes massage a part of family life. The expectant mother discovers in massage a drug-free path to relaxation and peace.

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Publishers of the million-seller The Art of Sensual Massage, the world’s best selling massage book. Our line of massage books, e-books and videos featuring easy-to-learn techniques make the perfect romantic gifts. Learn to give pleasure with your hands!

To preserve the atmospheric quality of this illustration from Sensual Massage Made Simple, Gordon Inkeles reports, “We balanced contrast and exposure levels one photo at a time.”

by Gordon Inkeles

The e-book has transformed publishing for publishers, authors, and readers. Fifteen years ago, as the author of a popular line of books on massage technique, I felt overwhelmed by intermediaries—agents, packagers, publishers, lawyers, buyers—all of whom managed to extract a fee for inserting themselves between my reader and me. Now, as the publisher of Arcata Arts, I realize that there is no reason to cut the pie in so many pieces.

As a publisher, I appreciate the simplicity of the e-book publication process, which eliminates a different group of costly intermediaries. Apart from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Sony, and the other e-book retailers, no shippers, fulfillment houses, wholesalers, or consolidators come between our customers and us. And the e-book is perfectible: if I find an error, I don’t have to hope a new printing will be justified so I can correct it.

As a reader, I’m attracted to the e-book’s ease of use, portability, and lower cost.

But e-books have shortcomings, too. A large part of the love readers feel for paper books comes from the way a book looks. In the mad rush to move every conceivable title into e-book formats, publishers are blithely trampling on one of the essential qualities that that makes owning a book worthwhile: The book itself should be beautiful.

Yes, electronic publishing dispenses with shipping, fulfillment, warehousing, and other traditional publishing jobs. But it requires a new kind of book designer, one who is comfortable with platform-specific design and able to keep up with a field that can change radically in a matter of weeks.

Make No Monstrosities

E-book design is becoming the elephant in the room, the subject nobody discusses. In the rush to market, illustrated books that were painstakingly designed page by page are mass scanned and, without editorial review of any kind, simply called good and published. Yes, all the text is there—somewhere—but what about the weird hyphenation and sudden text breaks that litter the screen, and the strange typos that abound? Art and photos are rendered in tiny smudged images or as gigantic, illegible blobs. Essential diagrams are uncoupled from the text they illustrate or simply shoveled into an incoherent pile at the end of the book.

The first cars were powered by sputtering, kerosene-burning steam engines that teetered on the edge of a violent explosion. Mass-scanned e-books are the steam cars of our time. Every one of these monstrosities will need to be rebuilt page by page to survive.

Publishers must find a way for the visual art of the book to survive e-book technology. We simply can’t afford to destroy a book’s design for the sake of portability. That means taking more time with each title, especially if illustrations, photos, or diagrams are involved; and it also means that an e-book–savvy designer is essential, since the same variable font capabilities that bring the author and reader closer make the page an obsolete concept.

The transition to e-books for the Arcata Arts line of illustrated massage books has required a lot of innovation, learning, and hard work to protect what we see as essential formatting features.

How We Handle E-Design

Our first e-book, The Art of Sensual Massage, was an older title with a two-column, photo-heavy layout that we’ve updated several times. It’s a beginner’s guide to massage and owes much of its success to an easy-to-use format.

The first question became: What happens to this friendly format in an e-book? The Art of Sensual Massage couldn’t suddenly become hard to use.

So we went through it page by page and photo by photo, tying text to relevant photos and making certain each photo displayed properly. Amazon.com provides an invaluable service that the other e-book retailers don’t: a page-by-page preview that shows exactly what readers will see on any Kindle-enabled screen. By the time we got to The New Sensual Massage, a more complex book, we were ready for the challenge of a three-column layout with captioned graphics—some in color—and sidebars. Happily, the Apple iBookstore gave us a way to display full-color photos for iPad, iPhone, and computer readers.

To maintain the integrity of our e-books, we decided to associate blocks of text with appropriate illustrations, a time-consuming and expensive process, but essential. Our books are not mass scanned. We set the page breaks and control hyphenation.

To prevent our large, beautiful photos from being difficult to see on an e-book screen, we enhanced each one so it would expand, sometimes to fill the whole screen, just as it fills a page in our paper edition.

We further controlled many essential page breaks to associate photos and text. And we hand-checked all scanned text from our older, film-based books to eliminate typos.

Finally, we created separate files for Amazon.com and for booksellers using the ePub format with Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection, which includes Sony, Barnesandnoble.com, Borders, Google, and Apple. We explain all this to our prospective customers and hope that they will see it as added value.

Obviously, all this is extra work, but we feel that we owe our readers the best possible aesthetic experience when they bring up one of our titles on a screen. And I believe attention to e-book design may offer an unexpected opportunity for small publishers. Houses with thousands of titles will mass scan to “keep costs down”; publishers with small lists can take the time to do it right and will be able to offer much higher quality e-books.

Eying the E-Future

As the e-book market continues to expand, two developments could burst the bubble.

First, as Joe Esposito suggested in “Our Platform Wars Problem” (July 2010), publishers could be casualties in a price war among mammoth companies that marks books down in order to sell e-readers. Eventually, e-readers themselves could drop in price the way calculators did, making the software—books—more valuable than the hardware—readers.

Arcata Arts decided to hold retail pricing at $9.95, about 50 percent of our retail price for traditional books and a sort of rough standard among various e-book sites. We’ve chosen the smallest of Amazon.com’s royalty rates, 35 percent, which permits us, and not Amazon, to set the list price of our books, the price on which our royalties are calculated.

The bubble might also burst if DRM protection were to fail as catastrophically as it did in the music business. Enforcement is up to Amazon.com and the DRM-protected ePub retailers, and they certainly have the clout—and motivation—to shut down piracy. I note with cautious optimism that even Apple, which broke the dam on DRM-free music, offers publishers DRM-protected e-books.

At this point, we clearly haven’t begun to see where the e-book will take the book, or the publishing industry. But we’re putting our money on a quality product, even if it takes more time and energy to produce. We love paper books, and we want to be able to love our e-books too.

Gordon Inkeles wrote and photographed books for Rolling Stone, G.P. Putnam, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Bantam, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins. In 1998, as publisher of Arcata Arts in Bayside, CA, he moved from labor to management. The ensuing 12 years as publisher have been the most rewarding in his writing career. Contact him at arcata@me.com.

INTIMACY GATEWAY

“Although The Art of Sensual Massage introduced me to massage as an intimacy gateway opener, my first ten minutes browsing Sensual Massage Made Simple taught me more about massage than I knew in my whole life before. ”

MASSAGE BECOMES POETRY

“I used to give an adequate massage that pretty much consisted of gently kneading every square inch of the body with a good oil, beginning with the toes, but I was always left with the feeling that I could have done better. Sensual Massage Made Simple showed me exactly why that was. ”

BUY THIS 75 MINUTE DVD

TIMELESS PHOTOGRAPHY

“Sensual Massage Made Simple is a genuinely useful video that brings Gordon Inkeles’s books to life. The photography is timeless — almost shadowless full natural light… in Arcata, California.”

A TEASER FOR THE REAL THING

“Only a video can show rhythms and pressures clearly,” Gordon told me. “The aesthetics in the film and in my books are meant as a teaser for the real thing. My hope is that people will take this video home and start massaging.”